


made with love

by distractionpie



Series: Band Of Brothers Week [7]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Gen, Gen or Pre-Relationship, Knitting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 21:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11722689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: George is a keen learner.(Band of Brothers Week 2 Day 1 - Hobby)





	made with love

Carwood is putting the finished touches on a new hat for Spina when George flops down beside him. 

“Could you teach me?”

Carwood looks up from his knitting. “What?”

“Knitting,” George says, brightly. “I want nice knitted stuff. I mean, the gloves you gave me last christmas are so much better than store ones and I really want more. But I get that you’ve only got so much time and you make stuff for everyone, so it wouldn’t be fair to get you to make me a sweater or something big - therefore I should do it myself, right?”

Carwood blinks. It’s true that he tends to keep the things he makes for his friends small, partly because there are so many people he wants to give them to and partly because of time and cost. As for George wanting a sweater, well Carwood decides not to even try to explain the concept of the sweater curse, never mind the ways in which it’s particularly relevant to George. How George gets from wanting knitwear to asking Carwood for lessons on producing his own still seems like a bit of a leap.

“I’m not sure that’s going to work out all well as you’re imagining,” Carwood says, trying to let him down gently.

George looks put out. “Why not? I mean you make all sorts of cool shit,”

Carwood sighs. “Yes George, but I have years of practice and learned from an expert.” Not to mention, the disposition to sit still and work for hours being detailed and precise - something he’s fairly certain George lacks the patience for.

George, however, is undeterred. “You’re the closest thing I’ve got to an expert and everybody knows nothing to start with,” he argues. “C’mon, surely you can teach me?”

His eyes have gone very wide, puppyish in a way that Carwood knows is a deliberate manipulation but still makes it hard to say no. “I can show you how to make something simple,” he suggests. “A scarf.” Even George couldn’t find that too hard.

“But you make cool stuff like sweaters,” George whines.

“I still make plenty of scarves,” Carwood points out, “And it’s a good way to practise stitches.”

“Do you? How come I’ve never seen you wearing any?”

Carwood bites his lip, not sure how to explain that as much as he loves homemade knits it just doesn’t feel right wearing something he’s made himself. Knitting had always been about giving for him. George seems determined to try. “Look, if you really want to learn I suppose I can show you the basics. I don’t have time now, but find me on Saturday-”

“Thanks!” George says, leaning over to wrap an arm around Carwood in a sideways sort of hug.

*

Honestly there was a part of Carwood that had figured George’s interest in knitting was a whim and most likely to have been discarded within a few days

Instead, he shows up at nine am sharp.

“I brought my own wool,” he says proudly.

Carwood takes the ball of yarn, examining it. The weight is fine and it’s a eye-pleasing shade of forest green, but the fluffy texture is less than ideal for a beginner.

“Are you sure you don’t want to start with something more tightly spun?” he asks. “This’ll be tricky to work with.”

George wrinkles his nose. “But it’s really soft. How tricky?”

“You could do it,” Carwood says, if George gets the hang of knitting at all the yarn should be manageable. “But it’ll slow you down and you’ll have to be even more careful not to mess it up because it’ll be hard to untangle.”

“I can handle it,” is George’s casually confident answer. Carwood decides not to fight it - George’s certainty is too charming to spoil.

He gets out a spare pair of needles and shows George how to cast on although he lets George decide how many stitches wide he wants his project. A sensible beginner project would be fairly narrow in order to speed up completion time - Carwood isn’t exactly surprised when George insists on going wide.

Once that’s all prepare he sets to showing George how to make a basic garter stitch. “Here, hold it like this,” he says, carefully positioning George’s fingers on the needles. It’s not especially tricky, Carwood had mastered it as a young child, and George has a quick enough mind and is good with his hands. It’s not the learning of the stitches that Carwood expects to trouble him, it’s persisting with them without getting distracted he thinks may prove difficult for George - for now he’s concentrating well enough though. “Okay, now bring the yarn under like this and then back over.” He ushers George through the movement. “Then just ease it through, bring the other needle out and... stitch.”

He guides George through the method twice more before releasing his hands so that George can try on his own.

He takes to it well enough and Carwood picks up his own project, gets a solid fives minutes of progress in before:

“Oh shit!”

Carwood turns, and sees that George has dropped some stitches. “I think I broke it,” he says sheepishly, and Carwood laughs.

“It’s fine, I’d have been more surprised if you hadn’t dropped a stitch at some point. “I can show you how to fix that.”

There’s another period of quite work before Carwood looks over to find George has somehow managed to get the yarn tangled up around one of his arms, and his attempts to free himself are only worsening the mess. His tongue is poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration as he tries to detangle himself, and Carwood can’t even work out how he got in such a knot to begin with, but he waves of Carwood’s offers of assistance with the claim unknotting himself feels like it ought to be part of the learning process.

In the end George sticks around for most of the day, working with surprising diligence and patience. There are a few more incidents that require him to draw on Carwood’s instruction, but for the most part he picks it up well and Carwood is able to work on his own projects.

It’s nice.

*

When George shows up a week later, Carwood is expecting to be asked for more lessons.

Instead, he’s presented with a finished product.

It’s lumpy at one end and growing smoother as George had picked up the knack and got the hang of maintaining tension, before getting messy in the middle when George appeared to have got turned about and started doing all his stitches in reverse. Mostly Carwood is impressed by the speed, at the pace George was knitting at the end of their lesson it would have taken him several hours of focused work to get his project to the length of even a small scarf but he's somehow managed to produce a long one.

“It’s very nice,” he says, because it’s true. It might not be perfect but just adds to it’s handmade charm.

“Good, because it's for you,” George says.

“You worked so hard on it and you don’t want to keep it?”

“Well, that’s sort of the point, right?” George says with a shrug. “If I wanted a scarf for me I’d just buy one.”

Carwood blinks, looking down at the scarf in his hands with new eyes. It’s so clearly the work of a beginner, but every inevitable dropped stitch has been picked up and neatly worked and George had clearly been painstaking when he’d attached the second skein of yarn because Carwood can’t even make out the join, it’s neatly finished with the ends woven in - suddenly, that George had picked such fancy yarn to start out with begins to make sense.

“You made this for me?” he asks.

Carwood doesn’t think he’s even seen George like shy before but there’s no doubt that’s what he’s seeing now. “It’s a gesture,” he explains. “I mean, it’s a scarf, but also... you’re always making stuff for us, and it’s really nice to get handmade stuff and feel the l- effort you’ve put in, so I thought...” he shrugs. “I know it’s not as good as you could make but-”

“It’s perfect,” Carwood interrupts, draping it over his shoulders. “It’s not about being made with skill, it’s about being made with love.”

George grins.


End file.
